JAXA Prepares To Try Making Whiskey In Space

schwit1 writes: An experiment to test how whiskey ages in weightlessness is about to begin on ISS: "H-II Transfer Vehicle No. 5, commonly known as "Kounotori5" or HTV5, was launched on Wednesday from JAXA's Tanegashima Space Center carrying alcohol beverages produced by Suntory to the Japanese Experiment Module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments on the "development of mellowness" will be conducted for a period of about one year in Group 1 and for two or more years (undecided) in Group 2." Don't worry, the astronauts on ISS won't be getting drunk. After the test period is complete the samples will then returned to Earth, untasted, where they will then be compared with control samples.

Comments

Re:drunks..

[FatdogHaiku]

Was the author drinking, whiskey when they titled this submission

I would think so, given that they are shipping already created whiskey up there to sit in zero G... This is about aging booze in zero-G, not creating it there. Having toured a distillery, I can tell you gravity is a very required component in fractional distillation... And during aging gravity helps move the alcohol inside the barrel, via convection.

The title really had me thinking about how you do fractional distillation when there's really no force separating liquid from vapor. Maybe you could use a laser or concentrated sunlight to heat the outside edge of a floating glob of wort and draw the vapor off with vacuum device... I don't think heating the whole mess to boiling would be very productive.

One interesting thing about getting out of a gravity well is everything we ever did before has to be adjusted for the lack of this pull we have been tied to forever. Maybe new alloys could be formed, or other chemical reactions might produce altered results, all from the lack of having a separating force missing from the process.